An Excerpt (Nonfiction)

Here's a brief excerpt from "Lessons from Joe," a personal essay that appeared in the Healing Project anthology Voices of Lung Cancer:

By the end of the fall of 1997, Joe was too weak and sick to do much of anything. He could still ride out to the old place, though. One warm November day, Joe and I sat on the screened porch of a fragile old house on one side of the land he had grown up on. Before us, the autumn sun blazed down on the fields where he and his parents had grown food to eat and sugarcane to turn into syrup. It blazed also on the bigger house where he had spent the first 17 years of his life, and on the thick piney woods where he had hunted and cut firewood.

The fields, the porch, and the house behind us were just quiet and still enough for Joe to say something about the war, just an offhand comment, maybe about how cold it had been over there in the winter of 1944. After a pause, I said something about how tough it must have been to be so far from home at such a young age. After another pause, I said I couldn’t imagine being an infantryman, just a regular soldier on the ground. Joe told me he had been part of a mortar squad, dropping shells into a tube and watching them explode a few hundred yards away. “Sometimes you could see the bodies fly up,” he murmured, shaking his head. I didn’t know what to say to that. Joe just leaned forward, resting his popeye forearms on his knees. He brushed back his pale gray and red hair. “A lot of bad stuff happened over there,” he said. “I guess that’s why I’ve got this.”

Why didn’t I jump right up and tell him that his cancer was not a punishment for what he had done in the war? I never know what to say, and in this case it took me a few moments to see what he meant. I immediately sensed that one word from me might unleash a torrent of war memories, the worst ones, the ones he hadn’t told to a soul. Alone on the porch out in the country, he could have told me everything, and he wanted to. But I just sat there, unable to think of a thing to say. I checked my watch, then changed the subject.

To contribute to The Healing Project's worthwhile efforts on behalf of those who experience cancer, Alzheimer's, alcoholism and other challenges, visit their website. To buy one of their Voices of... anthologies, visit Amazon.com.

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